


Ante Ora Patrum

by musamihi



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars: Shattered Empire
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Family, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Non-Canonical Character Death, Yavin 4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-31
Updated: 2016-08-31
Packaged: 2018-08-12 05:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 832
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7922752
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musamihi/pseuds/musamihi
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Poe Dameron dies in the crash-landing on Jakku; his father decides how to move on.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Ante Ora Patrum

It was the colors that first soaked into him on Yavin IV, even before the soft, sucking humidity of the atmosphere. He remembers: standing in the gangway of his freighter above all that startling tumult of green, the planet, impossibly large and impossibly close, making a reddened, sandy arch across the sky. The morning haze caught the sun in the air and held it, a silver patina over the lacquer-rich shades of his new home.

Decades later, the sun sets behind the clouds with a brilliant flash of rose gold, and he knows it intimately - the color his bedside lamp makes in the polished surface of a graceful bronze star, when he opens the drawer with the things that were hers. He knows.

He's having a drink in the yard. The comm's hailing signal reaches him from inside the house, and it's faint out here, like a bell from somewhere very, ver far away - gentle, rhythmic, mournful, the notes of a farewell. It fades to silence just as he's stirring himself to get up and answer.

There's a deep crescendo to the west: the ship that was trying to raise him. His landing pad is clear. Whoever's flying doesn't try to alert him again, but simply touches down, and by the time their boarding ramp lowers, Kes is there by the fueling station to watch them disembark. Leia Organa, who some twenty years ago wrote to _with great sorrow inform you of the honorable death in action of your wife, whom I mourn not only as a sister in arms but as a sister in fact, a particular friend_. A young man, moving stiffly, his dark eyes sick with worry and with something harder. In his arms, folded, a leather jacket, with its one blood red patch. 

The cold, desperate thing that grips him isn't fear, or dread, or grief, not yet. It's a frantic fluttering of regret, the ridiculous feeling that he should have answered that hail, that if he could go back in time to take the call, maybe, maybe the voice he'd have heard would have been - but it's too late - if only, if only -

They come inside, it seems to him in silence; certainly, he says nothing. He could be made of stone, one of those temples abandoned in the depths of the jungle, wearing soft under centuries of rain. They stand in the kitchen, and the words pour over him. His son saved this young man; this young man saved his son. He was the last one to see him alive. They were free, and they were flying, and they were laughing, and then his son died, throttling his way through a mission charged to him by the people who would see the Galaxy free and at peace.

It happened in a TIE fighter. That's the only surprise.

The young man says his name is Finn. He seems to want to say more, but he can't; and so Kes tells him, filling the silence, that he's grateful. He's glad his son's last minutes weren't spent at the hands of torturers. Finn looks as though he'd like to sink right into the ground.

Leia's voice is soft. _He didn't say anything to them. He betrayed nothing._

 _I don't care what he said,_ Kes snaps back. 

Silence falls. They offer to go.

 _No,_ he says. _No. Stay._

They stay the night. He leaves Finn in Poe's bedroom, standing like a lost sentry in the middle of the floor. Leia retires to the ship. And he goes out into the yard again, and sits in the increasingly colorless dark, watching as the stark white memorial he and his boy carved into a tree fades to blackness like everything else. Night leeches him numb.

It's the crimson splinter of dawn that rouses him, floods his mind, suddenly raw and singing like a freshly woken nerve, with memory: Poe in the kitchen, barely tall enough to work at the counter even with the stool. _Helping._ His knife slipped and red welled up at the side of his finger, and how quick he was to cry out and to sob - it spilled from him as easy as bleeding - how free and fearless and unhesitating was his tottering whirl toward his father's chest. How happy _he_ was, to feel Poe buried there. How sweet it could be, to stroke his hair and whisper to him and gently take his hand and show him: _there, see, it's already stopped._

He sobs like his little son, then, while the sky bleeds around him. 

And when it stops - when the day finally soothes the morning sky into blue - he says goodbye, to all of this. His guests are leaving, and so is he. Leia doesn't question him when he says he's coming with them. Perhaps she knows what it's like, to have nowhere else to go. His life is the last thing this war has left him with. He thinks: it might as well finish the job.


End file.
